‘All Bets Off’ on ’87 Budget, Dole Declares
Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole said today that “all bets are off” on a fiscal 1987 budget because House Democrats are playing “politics at its worst” by proposing a spending plan with no tax increases.
The Kansas Republican said the House Democrats want to make the Senate “walk the plank” on the issue of tax increases.
House Majority Leader Jim Wright (D-Tex.) replied, “If we produce a more attractive budget than they produce, is that a trap?”
Dole, meanwhile, said he is holding long-distance budget talks with White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan, who is in Bali with President Reagan, in hopes of finding a compromise acceptable to Reagan and a majority of the Senate.
Dole said he sent Regan details of a spending plan he could seek to substitute for the fiscal 1987 budget now pending before the Senate.
The pending budget, passed by the Senate Budget Committee, is opposed by Senate conservatives and the White House because it provides for higher taxes but less military spending than Reagan proposed.
“We suggested a compromise,” Dole said, “not the President’s numbers, not the committee’s numbers.”
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